Clayton Hardiman: The superheroes among us

Clayton HardimanSo here’s the difference between Alex Trebek and me: Trebek actually did snap an Achilles tendon while running down a burglar.

I probably would have just pretended to.

Maybe it would have been more accurate to describe this as yet another difference, one more tacked on to a long list of others, like looks, income, Q rating and charisma.

Ultimately, though, it comes down to this: Alex Trebek, it turns out, is a crime-fighting superhero.

Who knew?

The story came out this week when Trebek, best known as a television quiz show host, showed up at the National Geographic World Championship on crutches. It turned up he had injured himself while chasing down a burglar he allegedly had surprised in his San Francisco hotel room.

We all hope we would react the way Trebek reacted when he woke up to the sound of a stranger in his room, rummaging through his and his wife’s belongings. Unfortunately, I suspect that if it had been me, chasing down a burglar and, horror of horrors, gaining ground, I might have conveniently picked that moment to pull up lame.

What makes Trebek’s real-life heroism so deliciously satisfying is his standing as a qualifying nerd. Not that Trebek is immediately identifiable as such. He doesn’t wear the traditional uniform — taped glasses, pocket protector and radically high-hitched pants. Nor is he, as far as I know, a member of anybody’s audio-visual club, unless you count the ultimate AV club, the television industry.

Trebek’s claim to nerdiness is based on one thing only: For the past 27 years, he has presided over that nightly geek fest known as “Jeopardy,” the place where super nerds go to shed their secret identities.

Speaking as a nerd, here’s one of the things I can tell you about our people: We dream of moments like this.

I don’t mean what Trebek was talking about when he described waking up and finding a shadowy figure in his hotel room and thought he was dreaming.

No, I mean the kind of heroic daydreams that timid kids permit themselves in the relative safety and solitude of their bedrooms, when the curtains are drawn and they’re alone with their Marvel comic books and fantasies.

I mean the kind of dreams that make you go out trolling for radioactive spiders in the hope that their bite will grant you super powers and not some harsh form of radiation sickness.

And the only thing that cured me of that fantasy was being blessed to see what a genuine superhero looked like.

Now I’m not talking about a guy in a leotard and hood, hopping from skyscraper to skyscraper and sniffing out hoodlums with his spider sense. I’m not even talking about Alex Trebek racing down a hotel corridor.

No I’m talking about a man who never once wore an “S" on his chest and never donned a cape in his life. If he had a uniform, it was a simple one: blue work pants, white socks and suspenders. For years, he wore it everyday when he got up to go to work.

It had to be simple because usually he got dressed in the dark so as not to disturb his sleeping wife, who got up later to feed and tend to the children. He worked for decades, and when he retired, he went out and got another job. It was one job or another until the day he died.

Sometimes extraordinary people encounter extraordinary circumstances, and that’s when someone like Alex Trebek makes news. Such occasions can be valuable. They remind us that in the real world, superheroes really do exist.

But people like my grandfather are heroes, too. I didn’t know that, not until well after his death. At the time, I just thought he was a common man in common circumstances, doing what he had to do. I didn’t know then that that was one more definition of what a superhero was.